wonderful and anomalous as they appeared to it in the beginning. Processes involving complete change of form may be observed, at the present time, everywhere in nature; but they are observable, everywhere in the organic, as growth without breaches; even a primitive science has always recognized the gradual character of motion, the absence of gaps in the causal chain, at least outside of the initiative action of human will. Such a natural hypothesis of creation as we have above supposed, formed upon crude and superficial, but as far as it goes, logical reasoning from facts of observation, could not regard the process as other than a gradual one, in which simpler forms and conditions must be supposed to have preceded more complex ones; in other words, it could not logically conceive the process as other than an evolution. Traces of an idea of Evolution may be found in various crude forms in nearly all the earlier Greek philosophers, especially in Anaximander, Heraclitus, Democritus, Empedocles, and later in Aristotle. Such traces may even be found in many heathen mythologies in contradistinction from the Judaic. The progress of investigation, establishing the universality of natural law and, in every province, the gradual character of change was, before Darwin, as it has been since his work, in the direction of such a theory, as was shown by the ready acceptance with which Darwinism met, if not by the world at large, at least by the majority of scientists. In England, France, and Germany, there were others at work under the influence of thoughts similar to if not identical with those that inspired the researches and experiments of Darwin; and the nebular theory of Kant had already claimed in Astronomy what the Darwinian claimed in Biology. "When Kant, in his Natural History of the Heavens, which has become the fundament of modern Astronomy, says, 'Give me matter and I will make you a world,' what he intended to express was that the natural laws of matter are perfectly competent to render comprehensible to us the development of our well-known solar system."[94]